And now, a brief list of things on people’s weblogs that annoy me. If you wonder why I never read your site anymore, even when I have time to kill (which doesn’t happen much anymore), then take note of the following offenses.
- Whiny entries. But you knew that already. That’s nothing new.
- Obnoxious background music. When I am on the internet I am usually listening to music on iTunes. If I access a site that has obnoxious background music, in order to turn off the background music I have to turn off the sound… which means no more of my music on iTunes. (Currently I'm getting around that by listening to iTunes on my other computer. Sometimes it’s nice to work on two computers at once.) And because I use Safari as a browser,
WMA music files for some reason cause Windows Media Player to open and your page to go blank. So it’s your own fault if I never post comments on your site anymore. - Videos. Too much bandwidth for too little substance. Instead of waiting the 20 seconds necessary to wait for the video download, I’ll just visit another site.
- Giant photos. If your camera can take 5 megapixel pictures, they need reducing before you post them on your blog. And by reducing, I mean actually physically reducing the image into a smaller-size file that doesn’t take minutes to download. I don’t always have broadband, and even then, sometimes I don’t always have patience.
- Stupid photos. Please, for the love of all that’s holy, stop posting photos of you and all your buds posing together. In these cases, a picture isn’t worth ten thousand words. It’s worth a caption: “I had lunch with Binky, Fredo, Alfalfa, and Hyman at Jamba Juice. We all wore matching sunglasses. It was so amusing. We annoyed unsuspecting passers-by with our girlish giggling, and occasionally we’d look over our shades at people, simultaneously, as if that was cool.” On second thought, keep it and your photo to yourself. Especially the 5 megapixel photos.
- Obfuscating background images. Your favorite Van Gogh painting is not the easiest backdrop for 10 point dark blue text. I can’t read the damn stuff. So I won’t.
- When I go to your site to see what you’re thinking, and instead of telling me what you’re thinking you post another frigging quiz result which has determined which Disney princess you are, which O.C. cast member you are, what color goes best with your politics, what your randomly-generated Russian name is, or which demon might be the best one to possess your eternal soul. I would guess on the last one that it would be Tedium, the patron devil of boring blog posts.
- Entire passages of scripture; whole pop or worship songs; or someone else’s poem. Holy Moses, I know it meant something to you; but chances are I know that chapter/song/poem already and don’t need to see it repeated, no matter how much it made your soul cry out. Tell you what: Try linking to the page of some other sucker who actually printed it out, and spend your time on stuff you composed.
- Begging for responses, email, Xanga eprops, and crap like that. Get a life.
- People who post one-liners and think that’ll do. Yeah. It’ll do the job of driving me away. Good job. You didn’t need my sarcasm anyway.
- People who can’t write in complete words. It’s bad enough that these yammering fools write in sentence fragments, but they can’t even write whole words without sounding like a 13-year-old girl who’s been listening to too much hip-hop. “Yo, wazzup? I luv my nu site! U rock!” Obviously we’re not dealing with a touch-typer.
- PeOpLe WhO LiKe tO aLtErNaTe CaPiTaLs AnD LoWeRcAsE. Again, not touch-typers.
- You update your blog once every other month. Then, the instant you update it, you want to know why I haven’t read your latest post. Here's why: I can take my time to read your current one. It’s gonna be there for the next two months, ’cause you won't be adding to it until then. Honestly… if you post any less than weekly, don’t bother with a weblog. You obviously don’t have enough to say.
- Conversely, you update your blog two to five times a day and want to know why I didn’t read the third post last Friday. Okay, I update my blog a lot. But I never order people to read it. If you read it, great. If you don’t… exactly how are you reading this? …Never mind. If you can’t keep up with my regular ranting, relax. I’m not assigning homework or giving tests on it. In fact, I’m often surprised to discover that some of the people I’d never guess were readers actually read every entry… and sadly, when I discover this, I lose a lot of respect for them. Honestly, who has time to read all my babbling? So because I don’t care if you read every entry, I don’t think much of those who demand I read all their entries. I have a life, thank you.
- Quotes. I’m not talking about entertaining quips by famous people, like
“Of course I’m drunk, you idiot. I'm a journalist.” —Hunter S. Thompson
I’m talking about full-on block quotes from some obscure book that you feel you have to quote in order to make your point. Y’know, if you didn't make your point with your arguments, quoting some other idiot isn’t gonna convince me anything other than that you don’t know what you’re talking about, even if the other idiot does.
Well, so much for a brief list.